Hut site, Carrowmore, Co. Sligo

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Carrowmore, Co. Sligo

Within a rath at Carrowmore in County Sligo, two barely perceptible hollows in the ground may be all that remains of where people once lived.

A rath, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by earthen banks and ditches, typically dating to the early medieval period in Ireland, and commonly used as a farmstead. What sits inside this particular example is quieter still: two shallow, grass-covered depressions, each no more than a metre and a half to two metres across, separated by just two metres of ground.

Archaeological records first noted these features in 1989 and again in 1995, identifying them as possible hut sites within the rath interior. One hollow sits in the northern half of the enclosure; the other lies close to the inner edge of the rath bank, slightly to the north-north-east of the first. The tentative language used to describe them, "possible" and "may represent", reflects the difficulty of interpreting features this slight. Circular scoops in the earth can vanish entirely under centuries of grass growth, and without excavation it is rarely possible to say with certainty what made them or when. That ambiguity is itself part of what makes the site interesting: two faint marks in the ground, plausibly the footprints of small structures where people sheltered, eaten into the landscape so gradually that only their outlines remain.

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